Showcasing Niskayuna School District Parent-Teacher Organizations Website
Let me present to you, a classic case of how a school district used Zoho Wiki to make Parent-Teacher Organizations (PTOs), a truly collaborative online effort between teachers and parents, primarily for student enrichment activities.
Niskayuna School District Parent-Teacher Organization wanted a centralized location where parents and teachers could come together. Creating an interactive PTO Website was a straight forward answer.
http://www.niskypto.org/ would give you a sense of how dynamic and effective the portal is. In their own words, they wanted all parents to get involved, to know what's happening across all schools, and form a network to discuss issues, share ideas and build rapport with other parents and teachers.
Earlier, the authorities were using Microsoft SharePoint, but issues started cropping up. They were on the look out for other options to replace SharePoint. Completely satisfied with the offering, they finally zeroed in on Zoho Wiki.
Key points that tilted their decision in favor of Zoho Wiki :
Customization was simple and Zoho Wiki was flexible enough to incorporate their ideas.
They could easily create and manage groups, users across various schools, classes, teachers and parents.
Advanced Permission settings helped in defining who should view the page, who should edit the page, etc.
No complex software knowledge was needed to create the webpages. Inbuilt WYSIWYG Editor in Zoho Wiki made the job easier.
Could completely do away with training.
Bouquet of other Zoho Services like Zoho Creator could be seamlessly integrated and a wholesome useful application could be presented to parents & teachers. Using Zoho Creator, they were able to make a dynamic PTO bulletin board and Neighbor-to-Neighbor help service.
Customer Corner:
| "Before switching to Zoho Wiki, Niskayuna PTO used SharePoint for four years. Training and back-end customization became a nettlesome issue that got in the way of the PTO's overall goals. Now with Zoho Wiki, training is not required to customize the website and the use of Zoho Creator is much simpler than using a desktop application like SharePoint Designer . I would recommend Zoho Wiki to all educators who want to put up their own websites, share and collaborate online. " - John M. Whitney, Webmaster for NiskyPTO.org http://www.linkedin.com/in/johnwhitney |
To all educators out there, try our free version of Zoho Wiki. Set up interactive school websites and collaborate with teachers & parents; build online classrooms and creatively engage your students.
Cheers,
Susan
We have been using Microsoft Sharepoint in our school for a long time. However, we are not contented with the result. Guess we will shift to Zoho Wiki so that we can interact well with our student's parents.
We have been using Microsoft Sharepoint in our school for a long time. However, we are not contented with the result. Guess we will shift to Zoho Wiki so that we can interact well with our student's parents.